Tesla owners implant keys in their hands

In 2012, a young Steve . read a piece from The Verge about body hacking. It started with an anecdote about a piercing shop in Pittsburgh that implanted neodymium magnets in people’s fingertips, using nothing but ice cubes for anesthetic. This was the coolest thing in the world to my 15-year-old brain.

Of course my parents banned me from going to Pittsburgh for the procedure (as if I could, without a car or driver’s license), and they were probably right to do so – those magnets weaken over time, leave out your sixth sense and only scar tissue in your fingers to show for the effort. But the concept of body modification, of taking this rickety collection of organic matter and making it? betterLake fitnever left my mind.

So when someone implants an experimental chip in their arm to act as a car keyI get it. The video below is timestamped to show the chip’s function and skip the implant procedure, but be warned that the first 31 seconds of the clip show a man’s hand being surgically cut open to insert a microchip. to place.

Okay, “experimental” might be a bit much. The chip is a multi-function NFC chip, currently in beta testing, but soon to be a production model. The tester is Brandon Dalaly, a Tesla owner and apparent body modification enthusiast. And while his chip is a new design, he’s far from the first to implant Tesla-controlling hardware into his body.

Back in 2019, USA today ran a story software engineer and body-mud Amie DD and her Tesla-compatible upgradecalls it a “damn hack.” Amie DD’s work predates Dalaly’s beta chip, so she took an alternative approach: tearing the NFC tag off her car’s wallet-style key and having it encased in a bio-safe polymer before using it. implanted him in her arm.

Amie DD teamed up with a company called VivoKey to make the NFC chip implantable, leading to: a product called the TeslaFlex which can be bought from well-known biohack store Dangerous things. But the TeslaFlex had problems: it was only possible unlock do not operate the Tesla.

Look, Tesla keys run a little software called a Java mapused for secure communication between the card and the car. So VivoKey went back to the drawing board and developed a new implantable chip that can run those applets. The result? The VivoKey Apex — the same beta chip that Dalaly installed and demonstrated.

Of course, it’s not much more convenient to use the back of your hand to unlock your car than a key or phone. But the idea of ​​expanding the human body, enabling it to do things far beyond what evolution or biology can muster, is still incredibly interesting and appealing. when we go live in a cyberpunk dystopiawe might as well get the fun high-tech benefits.